One month after a judge declared Google’s search engine an illegal monopoly, the tech giant faces another antitrust lawsuit that threatens to break up the company, this time over its advertising technology.
The Justice Department, joined by a coalition of states, and Google each made opening statements Monday to a federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, who will decide whether Google holds a monopoly over online advertising technology.
The regulators contend that Google built, acquired and maintains a monopoly over the technology that matches online publishers to advertisers. Dominance over the software on both the buy side and the sell side of the transaction enables Google to keep as much as 36 cents on the dollar when it brokers sales between publishers and advertisers, the government contends.
The US gov’t does this to gain leverage over these companies – not to help Americans. They can then use them to conduct surveillance on us.
I think you’re mixing up conspiracy theories. Please try again, and keep your facts straight. The NSA is going to be getting data from Google no matter what happens. They don’t need another government organization to make Google spend millions of dollars on lawyers for that to continue.
While this warms my heart, I’m with-holding any feelings of happiness until something actually happens to Google.
I need 6 baby googs with binding agreements of no remerging for 80 years at least. Barring them from being purchased by an corporation valued over 1 billion in market cap. An interoperative, but open standards based, login service. Easily migrated data between each.
And then the same for Facebook ads, AWS, spinning out all of apples hardware purchases that deny technology advancement to competitors, Microsoft’s stranglehold on gaming, and Disney spinning out it’s studios.
I’m sure they’ll suffer a $10M fine, layoff half their critical teams, and give the execs a big fat bonus for saving so much money
I like Google’s weak argument that technology has shifted to mobile so advertising is different than it was before, and therefore they can’t have a monopoly. Because they’re not arguing that they don’t have monopoly, they’re arguing that the monopoly is less impactful. But if that’s true, then forcing them to split companies isn’t such a big deal, because surely they as a company have similarly shifted in focus, so they would only be losing a piece of their total advertising branch, not the whole thing.
